Too often, our lives pass us by. In what is possibly my all-time favourite Ridiculous Psychological Experiment - and believe me, that's saying something - researchers stopped people on a university campus and asked for directions. Halfway through the exchange, two accomplices, posing as workmen, barged between them, carrying a door. By the time they had gone, the researcher had been replaced by someone different. According to post-experiment interviews, a majority never noticed.

This pervasive sense of being distracted feels like a modern affliction - a function of too much email, too many mobile phones, or the result of having relentlessly bad television as the backdrop to our lives. So it's reassuring to find that it was a problem in 1910, too, when Arnold Bennett wrote How To Live On 24 Hours A Day, one of the most eccentric yet timelessly wise books of advice you're ever likely to read (you can do so, free, at tinyurl.com/2xckuc).

Bennett's audience was the new class of suburb-dwelling commuters: gents who travelled into town for white-collar jobs that held out the promise, for the first time since the industrial revolution, that work could be fulfilling. But it wasn't. Instead, it led to "the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by".

Bennett is a stoic. You don't have to love your job, he says, but if you don't, don't let it define your life. The "typical man... persists in looking upon those hours from 10 to six as 'the day' " and the rest as useless "margin". "You emerge from your office. You are pale and tired. At any rate, your wife says you are pale, and you give her to understand that you are tired. During the journey home you have been gradually working up the tired feeling. The tired feeling hangs heavy over the mighty suburbs... like a virtuous and melancholy cloud."

Responsibilities outside work don't register much for Bennett -childrearing goes unmentioned; housekeeping and cookery are done by servants - but his central idea echoes down the decades: cultivate your capacity to pay attention - to not let life go by in a distracted blur - and time expands. His book is full of techniques for finding a few hours a week to study music, history, public transport systems. His point isn't what you pay attention to; it's that you pay attention. "The mental faculties... do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change - not rest, except in sleep."

It's easy to misinterpret as the barking of a drill sergeant who wants you to cram more achievements into your day. But Bennett's insight is that zoning out is tiring, not relaxing; half-hearted semi-focusing causes life to feel like an exhausting blur. He was born 140 years ago this month, and died in 1931, so he never had to confront reality TV-watching, or mindless websurfing - the things we do (or half-do) to relax, but that leave us curiously drained. One suspects he wouldn't have been a fan.